


An Incriminating Photo

by frechi123



Series: Epic Rap Battle University of History [1]
Category: Epic Rap Battles of History (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, M/M, My First Work in This Fandom, Out of Character, Where do I even get this stuff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-09-28 22:42:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20433674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frechi123/pseuds/frechi123
Summary: One photo has an angry Edgar Allan Poe on Stephen King’s hands - but not for what Stephen is thinking.





	An Incriminating Photo

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been watching too much ERB on YouTube. Now I’m making fanfiction that I see about their universe.
> 
> Sue me.
> 
> I will only ship characters, not the people who play them. And they don’t always have to be in the same rap battle - it just so happens that these two are.
> 
> Also, they'll probably act out of character from how they really are/were, that's to be expected here.

To think, my very first story here is going to start in my second year of college. And it all started with a misunderstanding.

********

Another day at ERB University, and I’m reading Cujo, a book I wrote when I was only in middle school. Usually, it always reminds me of how I came to write it.

Completely on accident.

It had simply started out being a writing prompt for our 6th grade English class during the second semester. But that day, I had been sick, and I was so out of it, I went off the rails from the prompt.

Everyone had kept giving me weird looks.

Probably because the prompt only needed 2 sheets at most and I’d gone up to the teacher 4 times to ask for more paper. Or was it 6? Like I said, I was sick, so my memory is hazy.

I did remember that she basically threw the whole stack at me, though. So I took it back to my desk and wrote all over all of them.

Next thing you know, my teacher is knock out impressed with me and trying to send the pages off to get published into a book.

It’s actually one of the reasons I’m one of the more well known here in ERBU, in the College of Literature. But that’s for another day.

Anyway, I gained some enemies that day in class for being a show-off, unintentional as it was. Tolkien and Shakespeare were more dominant of them, seeing as they wanted to be authors themselves (they didn't pen anything until high school hit).

So yeah, I spent most of my time hiding out from those two.

And it's not like I had any friends at that point either. Everyone thought I was too creepy to be around, or just plain strange.

That's when Edgar Allan Poe walked into my life.

He was my only friend in middle school, the only one willing to stand up and get those two to back off.

All throughout middle school since he’d arrived, stemming into high school, people started making fun of him instead of me. It went from his hair, to the fact he wrote things with feathers instead of pens, even what he wrote on was more disturbing than anything I had ever written. But he never cared what people had to say about him then.

It's probably one of the reasons I fell in love with him over the years. Yes, call me a sucker, call it cliché, but it happened, give me a break!

Obviously, he doesn't know. He doesn't know even know what my S.O. is, and I’m really afraid to tell him because I don’t know his either.

Lately, since we got to ERBU, his tough resolve has slipped. Mainly because the opinions of people here mattered more than they did in high school or middle school.

If they even catch him doing anything else that didn’t ring disturbing, they’re going to take it out on him and his work, which he doesn’t deserve. His parents are much worse about it.

He even watches what kind of photos he takes nowadays. He has two accounts on Instagram: one public, one private. I always find it funny to remind that he has an Instagram and still hasn’t seen any movies, not even on a cassette tape. Anyway, the public one always has creepy, scary, or SFW disturbing things posted all over it, sometimes random stuff, other times about what he’s working on. He never posts anything NSFW because that’s too much for even him to handle.

Ironic, right?

Anyway, on the private one is where he mostly keeps pictures that he takes with me, and there are a lot of them. It’s not so much me that could ruin his reputation (because people still think I’m quite creepy) as much as it is the poses we’re in, mostly ones that people in a photo booth would take; silly, faux-serious, romantic...

_He doesn’t feel the same way, Stephen. Why would he? Get over it._

Sighing, I turn back to my desk and pick up The Raven, which Edgar wrote himself around the same time I did Cujo (he was at a different school at the time, after all), and start re-reading it.

I only get a few sentences in when the door to the dorm slams open.

_“Stephen!”_

I look up. Edgar is standing there, which that in of itself isn’t unusual (he’s my roommate, after all), but he’s fuming. His tie is untied in his right hand, clenched into a fist. His hair, normally a tidy mess, is all askew. He’s redoing the buttons on his signature black suit as he marches on his dress shoes right into the room and yanks me up right by my shirt, out of my desk chair which swivels away at the force, and is a green that I’ve dubbed “Green Mile”, which scares me because A) I’m at least half a foot taller than him, so it shouldn’t have been that easy, and B) he seems to be extremely angry with me, which hasn’t happened before. What have I done?

“Whoa, Eddie, calm down!” I say, not daring to move in case he would hurt me if I do. “What’s wrong?! Why are you so upset?”

“Don’t play games with me, Stephen!” he says, startling a bit at the nickname. Considering he hates nicknames (last week Frederick Douglass called him ”Eddie P” in passing and ended up with a hand print across his cheek for a few days) as much as he hates unnecessary criticism, even if I do it (because he once stopped speaking to me for a week in high school after I called him "Ed"), it appears that he doesn’t mind now, or doesn’t care because of the current situation. He lifts his left hand, which has one of his phones, to my face. “Explain _this!_”

I study the screen. There’s a picture of the two of us sitting in the Macabre Shack, where we always go for a good book and their eccentric little cafe. We’re sitting on the couch that’s in the back of the store, making some sincere smiling faces. My arm is around Edgar’s shoulders and he’s resting his head on my shoulder. We’re both wearing pink ribbons as we had donated tips that were going towards helping women with breast cancer.

Literally all of the women in the store went “aww”. The men there would probably have called us sissies if the women weren’t outnumbering them at the moment.

It’s one of the private photos. I remembered it, we took it last week. He asked me to upload it to his account for him because he had to rush to class.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” I ask, looking at it.

“The problem is not what is in the picture. It’s where you chose to upload it!” Edgar backs out of the close up and shows me the phone again.

I look again before realizing what I’ve accidentally done.

This is his public account. I’ve uploaded it to the wrong one.

“Oops...” I say, voice trailing as I continue to look at the phone.

“That’s all you have to say about this?!” Edgar snaps, dragging me over to his side of the room and forcing me to sit in his own desk chair, which is such a pitch black it can only be described as “Midnight Dreary”. It's also quite gaudy and doesn't spin around.

"I'm sorry, okay?" I say, watching him pace around the room. "I uploaded it to the wrong account. You must have given me the wrong phone."

He didn't say anything for a while, just continued to pace, and I wonder why he hasn't deleted it from that account yet. Although, if I'd asked, I'd probably end up getting backhanded.

"I bet you're wondering why I haven't deleted it," he says, not facing me. I'm shocked, but not so much surprised. We're often pretty good at reading one another's minds. He turns around to look at me now, and even though he's still very much angry, I can see that resolve has dropped a bit, as his eyes were slowly starting to shine. He was about to cry, another scary thing since in the few times he actually had, it was his parents being critical. 

Edgar takes a deep breath before deciding to speak again. "It doesn't even matter now. They already saw it." He suddenly turns and punches my desk, so hard hat the corner breaks off and his knuckles are scraped and slightly bleeding. “If only _they_ hadn’t talked and they wouldn’t have found out!”

What? 'They'?

"Who saw it? And who talked?”

“Lady Gaga and Bill Nye talked, obviously, those two motor mouths! And now my parents have seen this photo!”

I blink. Once. Twice. Bill Nye, the super excitable engineering student of Mr. Newton’s nightmares, and Lady Gaga, the sassiest and most eccentric star anyone did see, have the tendency to suck at keeping any secret. That’s why people usually look to them for info: because they love trying to find info and tell people about it. It’s also why people try to stay under the radar. The only confusing part is why they were looking at Edgar’s page in the first place, or why they were even talking to his parents since they barely knew him.

“What did they say?”

I’m answered by the phone coming straight for me, which I promptly catch, and with “Why don’t you see it for yourself? Do you see how incriminating this photo is to them?!”

The picture still doesn’t look damning, so I check the comments instead. 

Oh no.

There’s a mix of comments dissing him on two things: S.O. and reputation.

I sigh, thinking I know which one his parents were going to light into him for.

“Is it really that bad? Do they really not know?” I ask.

Edgar snatches the phone up and tilts my head up to make me look at him, which clearly does nothing for my heart. “Obviously they don’t know! You of all people should know this better than anyone!” He steps back, and then throws his phone with a yell of frustration (it happens often for him) against the wall. It only knocks the batteries out, the phone does not break. “I have spent all of this past year since we got here trying to prove myself to my parents, that I wasn’t faking anything. Now it’s all going to come crashing down!”

To be honest, I don’t know why I made the assumption I had that day. I should have known better. More on that later.

”Edgar, if your parents won’t take a hint now, you need to let this go,” I say, finally standing up and facing him while he faces the wall. “They need to realize that they can’t change who you are.”

“They’re not trying to change me,” he snaps, finally turning around. “It doesn’t matter what I do. I’ll never be good enough for them!” He stomps his foot. “You have no idea how hopeless I feel right now - you think there’s a solution, but they would rather not hear you out! Even if they did, they won’t accept it!”

He had no idea that’s how I’m feeling right now. Why did I have to feel this way for him? He thinks this partially my fault. And there’s no way he’d want to hear me out right now.

I feel a tear about to run down my cheek, so I hide my face and bolt for the door.

“Where are you even going, Stephen?!” I can hear Edgar’s voice behind me. Still furious. A cadence of sadness lay in it though. I know he wanted me to stay, but right now, my own sudden sadness was clouding that judgement.

Without looking back at him, I say, “Like you would care about that, or how I feel about this whole thing right now.” Not wanting to see his expression, I slam the door behind me and start running down the hall, letting the tears flow freely as I run.

*****

I’m hiding out in the spookiest section of the Literature Building - the 4th floor, as there are no classes to be held up there for now, so it’s constantly dark. Room 4929 was the only one that was ever unlocked and no one bothered to lock it again.

Behind the couch in the room by the teacher’s desk, I’m curled up crying, with my glasses off to the side on the ground for now as I constantly wipe my eyes, and thinking about what happened moments ago.

Would Edgar really think I was trying to sabotage him on purpose? And why did have to be so negative about it? It’s times like this I wish he told me his S.O. earlier so I would less likely make these mistakes.

“Stephen, honey? Are you in here?”

“Hey, you alright there, Stephen?”

I recognize those voices. I peer out slowly from behind the couch and see two familiar faces at the door.

“Sarah? Oprah? What are you doing up here?”

If there's anyone I can count on in hard times, besides Edgar (at least, not today), it's Sarah Palin, Alaskan commentator and side author, and Oprah Winfrey, ERBU's TV personality to the stars. I'd met them near the far back half of high school. It's funny how we all became friends, but they were always supportive of my ideas and of course I would support theirs.

"We can ask you the same question," says Sarah, walking further into the room and sitting on the couch end closest to me.

"How did you even know I was here?"

"Gaga and Nye tipped us off. They saw you running past from their 'secret vantage point'," says Oprah. She walks over to where I am, stands me up, and leads me to the couch, sitting me next to Sarah before she sits on the other side of me. "One of these days someone's going to have to find out where they keep that thing. But enough about them. Why are you crying, honey?"

Hearing their sympathetic voice makes a whole new wave of tears fall from my eyes and I tell them what went down back at our room.

"What?" Sarah says eloquently. "That doesn't sound like Edgar... and it's not like you posted it on purpose there, right? Where's that picture?"

I reach into my top layer shirt pocket and hand Sarah my phone. She unlocks it (she already knows me like the back of her hand) and pulls up Instagram, searching for Edgar's account through mine. When she finds it, she looks at the picture and then shows it to Oprah. 

"What are the pink ribbons for?" asks Oprah, raising an eyebrow to them. 

"Oh," I say, glancing down, "The Macabre Shack had a jar out in the store that week - they were saving money to send off to hospitals that were helping women fight breast cancer. We contributed some and got the ribbons."

Sarah's face morphed into what could only be understanding. "Wouldn't that kind of thing ruin his reputation? A pink ribbon on the suit on the supposedly most disturbing author at the ERBU? He'd fly into a rage about that, don't you think?"

And that's when it clicks for me.

It's his reputation he's worried about having come crashing down.

"Oh, lord," I say, leaning so far forward that my hands hide my head. "I can't believe I got the wrong idea about why he was so mad."

"You want us to talk to him?" Sarah asks, putting a hand on my back.

I nod. "You'll probably have better luck than I will right now."

She and Oprah stand up. "We'll be back, okay?"

With that, they head out.

*****

It’s good that I don’t have classes today, as it has been nearly an hour since the girls left. I’ve been contemplating back behind the couch since then, wondering how I would even face, let alone speak, to Edgar again. Why did I let my feelings get in the way? I should have just powered through and tried to help him get through this, as I had before, but instead I chose to run.

I didn’t notice that the girls had shut the door, because moments later, the door opens slowly, and I, from my vantage point, flat on my stomach, try to inch forward to see who’s coming in.

“Steph? Are you here?”

Two things. 

First off, no one has ever called me that before. Usually I was Stevie or Steve to some of the people here, but I told them not to do that often unless they actually wanted to mix me up with the other people that could be referred to that way.

And second, that voice is neither Sarah’s nor Oprah’s.

It’s Edgar’s.

What is he doing up here?!

As soon as he steps in closer, I can see that he’s clearly been crying from when I saw him earlier. Somehow he looks like even more of a mess. I can see his phone practically being crushed in his hands.

“He’s probably left by now...” I can hear him say dejectedly. Then he shouts. “How can I ever face him after this?! He’ll probably never want to face me now!” He runs to the couch and throws himself into it, in a very undignified manner that isn't becoming of him at all, as I shrink back it behind and it slides a few inches back.

And all of a sudden, that's when I hear it.

Hearing Edgar angry, angry at me - _with _me, to be specific - would clearly break my heart. Especially if I had no idea what it was what I did.

But now, in this moment, I find out what breaks my heart more.

It's not like I haven't seen Edgar cry before. Having parents like his will do that to you eventually. But I've never heard him crying as hard as he is right now - worse than anything his parents ever put him down for combined. And all I do is listen - I don't try to sneak out or say anything to him yet.

"My parents always said you were too good for me." He's talking to himself through his tears. "It's the only thing in which I can agree they're right."

My heart stops. He thinks I'm too good for him? How could his parents stoop so low?

"I think it was that rap battle assignment we did in junior year," he continues. "I bet Gaga and Nye leaked it on their stupid Instagrams and then my parents somehow found it. They saw what you said to me. They weren't even mad at you. It was that last line that beat into their heads."

_Fame, money, talent, success, you'll always have less - never more!_

I can't believe I used the last word (or words, when I used it) of his own story against him. 

"How could I be so stupid?! Maybe I should have told you when I had the chance... and now I've lost it forever... why would he ever like me now... after all this...?'

Hold it.

Did I hear that right?! _He_ likes _me _that way?!

I'm not sure why I start crying myself suddenly - relief that I haven't lost my chance, happy that he could feel the same - but I know it's what caused him to peek over the couch and see me a crying mess much like himself.

"Stephen?! Have you been here the whole time?!" He sounds so surprised, I can't help but laugh at his tone. He's doing a lot of things that he would hate to be caught doing today. Then I nod.

He hops off the couch and walks around so he can sit beside me. And once again, he surprises me.

Apparently he walked all the way here in his pajamas. He would never even peek out the door of our dorm still wearing them (it's not like they were embarrassing, they were just pitch black), let alone run halfway across the school. 

Oh, he was serious about this.

I don't know what to say to him. We're both really teary messes at the moment - all because of some misunderstanding.

“Edgar, I’m really sorry that I stormed out. You were upset, so I left instead of making you feel better.”

“No, Stephen, I’m the one who should be sorry. I blew up at you for something so trivial. You didn’t deserve that. It was an accident, what you did.”

For a bit it’s just silence. Not unwelcome, just contemplative.

"What did you parents say when they saw that picture?" I ask finally. I have to admit I'm curious, especially since their opinion being given is what upset him.

"You didn't see the comments?" Edgar responds.

"They commented on the picture?!"

"Yes!" He pulls out his phone again, and shows me. "Here - it's a few scrolls down."

I look at it - really look - until I find what I assume to be comments written by them.

_"Wow. Of course our son has let us down again. Your cousin is more terrifying than you are!"_

_"You're worried about your shoddy reputation? Your poor man there could lose his own. He's too good for you. You know that."_

I'm angry and embarrassed at the same time. You see how terrible his parents are? They're too worried about his reputation which doesn't even affect them. But did they really call me "his man"? Are they serious about that?

"They really said that?" 

Edgar looks at me, and he suddenly looks completely resigned. "Why are they so horrible to me? Why do their words still affect me when they’ve been spouting lies my whole life?!”

Without hesitation, I pull him close to me for a hug. He definitely needs one. We sit like that, me stroking his hair and back to try and calm him down while he cries softly.

*****

It’s been another couple hours and we’ve nodded off to sleep, still sort in the same position we were in. I wake up and look around. It seems lighter in here... Turning my head, I see that the bat lamp in the corner is on. Who turned it on? Neither of us had moved.

My phone’s on the ground a few inches away. I reach for it without waking Edgar, and then send off a text to Oprah and Sarah:

**FangsShining: ** _What happened? Why didn’t you come by?_

A beat. Then, a response.

**OnceYouGoOprah: ** _Didn’t ya see the bat lamp @ the corner? plus you 2 looked so cute we didn’t wanna wake ya <3_

**PalinAlaska** _sent a photo_

I can’t believe these two. Wait, actually I can. I study the picture, a smile slowly creeping onto my face. I look down and see Edgar still sleeping. Today's been harder on him than on me, and it's nice to see him relaxed first the first time today.

Without really thinking about it, I press a kiss to his forehead and then continue looking at the phone.

I don't even notice that Edgar has stirred or made any note of moving until I feel an arm around my shoulder and a kiss on my cheek. I feel my eyes getting very wide and my grip tightening just so, before I finally turn to face him.

“You know,” I say, “that this may have been the only favor your parents have done for you.”

He thinks for a moment. Then he stands up and extends his hand to me. I grab it and pulls me up. He embraces me once more.

“You know what? You’re right.”

********

Seems kinda strange, huh? No one said it was ever normal here at ERBU. And trust me, we got more stories for you guys. Gaga and Nye better start watching their backs... after all, we do know Oprah.

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure where I was going with this now, it is kinda clunky though.
> 
> You’ll get more ERBU experience come next story! See you later!


End file.
